


Won't Change Anything

by yet_intrepid



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Abuse Apologism, Angst, Dysfunctional Family, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Episode: s02e03 Bloodlust, Gen, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, Physical Abuse, Pre-Series, Weechesters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-25
Updated: 2014-06-25
Packaged: 2018-02-06 05:18:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1845745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yet_intrepid/pseuds/yet_intrepid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With all the time his family spends lying to the world, Sam’s determined that when it’s just them, he’s going to tell the truth—both the small truths and the big truths—and damn the consequences.</p>
<p>(Or, the fight with Dean in "Bloodlust" isn't the first time the words "hit me all you want; it won't change anything," have come out of Sam's mouth.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Won't Change Anything

“That’s just mean, Dad!” Sam knows he’s getting loud, knows he needs to cool it, but Dad is being flat-out impossible. “The deaths on your new job are all a month apart, a  _month_ , and I’m just asking for two days. Nobody’s going to die because we stay in town for two freaking days so I can go to Regionals with the Math League.”

“Know that for sure, do you,” says Dad. “I guess it doesn’t matter, then, that the monster’s trail is getting cold while you stand there whining.”

“Getting cold? Come on, Dad. It was already cold when you dug up last week’s papers three days ago.”

“And it’ll be colder in two more. Pack, Sam.”

Sam turns on his heel and grabs his bag from the floor. He drops it on the bed and starts straightening out the clothes so it will zip shut, but he doesn’t stop talking. “This happens every time,” he says, half to Dad and half to himself. “Soccer. Orchestra. Theatre. Debate. Every time I try to have friends. At least when I had to quit debate it was actually to stop people from dying.”

“People  _are_  dying, Sam.” Dad’s still as flat and immovable as ever.

“Not in the next two days!”

“They’re more likely to die later if we don’t go now.”

Sam zips his duffel bag with more force than necessary and looks at Dad over his shoulder. “You hate it when I do the things I like, that’s all. You don’t  _want_  me to be in clubs and have friends. You get angry every time I’m happy!”

It takes Dad two steps to cross the room and grab Sam by the shoulders, spinning him around. “You’re right,” he says, and he’s starting to raise his voice just a little, just enough that Sam’s heartbeat quickens. “I don’t want you wasting your time with clubs, and I don’t want you forming any more attachments than you damn well have to. I don’t want you to settle, son, you hear me? You do that, pretty soon you’ll start thinking everything’s normal, everything’s safe. Like I did. Like your mother did.” His fingers dig in, squeezing tight and strong. “Well, I’ve got news for you: nothing’s normal and nothing’s safe. And it’s our job to do something about that.”

Sam’s gone tense where Dad’s gripping him and shaky at the knees, but he raises his chin anyway. He looks Dad in the eye. “And I guess never getting to be happy is in the job description?”

Anger flares up in Dad’s eyes, and Sam braces. But then Dad’s lip curls a little and the anger becomes bitterness—dark, solid, hard.

“No, Sam,” Dad says. “That’s just life.”

He lets Sam go. “Get your toothbrush. We’re heading out as soon as Dean gets back with supplies.”

Sam obeys, but at the bathroom door he turns to look at Dad again, and waits until Dad looks back.

“You can pull me out of every last club that every last new school offers,” he says. “It won’t change anything. I’ll just sign up for the next one.”

——

They drag their stuff into a new motel room. The faded lime-green bedspreads clash with the pastel print of a blond, feminine angel on the wall. Dean starts on the salt lines and Sam makes sandwiches, but Dad takes one look at the print, throws the keys across the room, and goes straight for the whiskey. Sam sighs as he screws the lid back on the peanut butter. The angel doesn’t look anything like the pictures he’s seen of Mom, but the only other reason he can think of is that Dad is going through a sudden religious crisis, and the chances of that are laughable. Whenever Pastor Jim brings up religion, Dad mostly just shrugs and says he has better things to think about.

So Dad’s thinking about Mom, and drinking, which is all-around great. Sam picks up his sandwich and leaves the other two on the counter, wishing he were at Regionals with the Math League right now, like he’s supposed to be. Instead he’s two states away for one of Dad’s jobs, one that won’t get worked on anytime in the next twenty-four hours if the way the whiskey’s disappearing is any indication.

Sam sits down on one of the lime-green beds, eats his sandwich, and watches Dad and Dean. Normally he’d be doing math in his head right now, prepping, but there’s no real use for that now that he doesn’t get to go to Regionals. He wonders when Dad will deal with their school records. That probably won’t happen tomorrow, either.

Dean finishes up the salt lines and goes to get his sandwich. Sam watches him glance at Dad, then run a cup full of water, putting it and the last sandwich beside Dad without a word.

“Piss off, Dean,” says Dad.

Dean holds up his hands, conciliatory, and backs away. But Sam bristles.

“He was just trying to help, Dad.”

“He can help when I tell him to,” Dad shoots back. He’s not slurring yet. Sam knows this is a bad time to get into an argument.

He doesn’t care.

“Okay,” he says, “so if you pass out on the floor after you’re done with that whiskey tonight, we’ll just leave you there. Since you won’t have told us to help.”

“Don’t get smart with me.”

“I’m not,” says Sam. “I’m just following your directions to a hypothetical logical conclusion.”

“Sam,” says Dean, “there’s one logical conclusion right now and that’s that you need to shut up.”

Sam throws a glance at him. _I’m sticking up for you, you big idiot_ , he wants to say, but he doesn’t. He just folds his arms and looks back at Dad.

“Sometimes you want us to wait for your orders before we so much as brush our teeth,” he says, “and sometimes you act like we should be able to read your mind. It’s not fair. You can’t expect us to—”

“What isn’t  _fair_ ,” Dad interrupts, “is that you expect me to put up with you mouthing off when I’ve been driving all day. You get one chance to drop it. Just one.”

The urge to say  _or what?_  is strong, so strong that Sam opens his mouth to blurt it out before he catches sight of Dean’s face. The irritation from before is gone and now Dean looks a little scared. His eyes flit between Dad, who’s pouring himself another generous helping of whiskey, and the print up on the wall.

Sam shuts his mouth. Dad keeps drinking. Dean keeps staring, standing between Sam and Dad.

Sam kicks off his shoes and pulls out a book. He’s still right, he thinks. He had to give in this time, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s right.

——

Dad doesn’t wake up until one-thirty the next day. When he does, he showers and goes out. Sam and Dean spend the day watching re-runs of last year’s season of the X-Files, sitting side by side in silence.

Dad comes back after dinner and heads straight for the print on the wall. Dean clicks the TV off as Dad pulls down the picture, shoving it under one of the beds.

There’s a hole left in the wall, some ripped wallpaper around it. “Won’t we get in trouble for that?” Sam asks Dean under his breath.

Dad hears, whirls around. “You got something to say, Sam?”

“No, sir,” Sam says.

“Don’t lie to me,” says Dad.

“He’s just worried about the hole in the wall,” Dean puts in. “That’s it.”

“Don’t answer for your brother,” says Dad. And he looks hard at Sam. “You think you need that angel up there watching over you?”

“No,” says Sam, “I just—”

And then something bursts inside him.

“I just hate how you get rid of anything that reminds you of Mom; I hate how you can’t look at a picture of a blond person without needing to drink; I hate how you never talk about her but you still act like my whole life, everything I ever do, should be shaped around her dying! I don’t even know her, Dad. I never knew her and I never will and how would  _you_  feel if somebody made you give up everything to get revenge for a person you didn’t even know?”

“Sam!” cries Dean. He reaches for Sam; Sam breaks away from him.

“Mom’s not the only person that matters!” he yells. “We matter too! But you never listen to me, and you never even let Dean  _talk_ , and we’re alive and she’s dead—she’s dead—and you act like she’s the only one that’s important and what good will that do, Dad? What good will that do anybody?”

Dad’s standing still, like he’s passed out standing up. Dean is pale, wilting. Everything buzzes in Sam’s ears, high-pitched and loud. He’s breathing hard. He thinks he might be crying.

“You can’t just hide a picture and fix the problem,” he says. “It doesn’t work to have Mom when you want her to matter more than us, but not when thinking about her is going to hurt you.”

He’s definitely crying, just a little, and he squeezes his eyes shut to try and force the tears back. When he opens them, Dad is gone and Dean is following him out the door.

Sam kneels down by the bed and pulls out the angel picture. He hangs it back up on the wall.

——

“You got off easy, you know that.”

Sam, curled up on the bed, looks up as the door opens. Dean’s radiating anger. A heavy dark frustration seeps from him as he enters the motel room.

“You throw a fit like that, run your mouth, say shit about Mom, and he doesn’t so much as smack you or send you for a run. You ought to be grateful, Sam. You ought to be out there eating your words and begging for forgiveness.”

“Dean,” Sam starts. He’s tired, tired of arguing, tired of everyone hating him. He just wants to close his eyes and imagine he’s far away.

But Dean won’t let him. “You’re a selfish little kid, you know that? Think you can say whatever you want with no consequences, think you get to choose how your life’s gonna run. God. He should’ve slapped some sense into that head of yours. Hell, I could do it myself.”

Sam sighs. He gets up from the bed, stands in front of Dean. “Okay,” he says.

Dean blinks at him, momentarily shaken from whatever funk he’s in. “Okay what?”

“Okay, so hit me.” Sam doesn’t even have to work to keep his voice flat, he’s that tired of all this. He displays his hands—nonthreatening, open. “If it helps you. But it’s not going to make what I said go away. Dad’s still making me sacrifice what I love, making shape my whole life around his idea of a person I never knew.”

“She’s our mom!” Dean shouts. “She’s worth any sacrifice we could ever make for her!”

“That doesn’t mean our sacrifices help her,” Sam says, and then Dean’s hand is snapping back and cracking across his mouth. Sam wobbles a little as he turns his head back forward. He wipes at his lip, then drops his hand, waiting to see if Dean will hit him again.

But now Dean looks tired too, deeply weary like Sam feels, and Sam knows they’ve both just made another useless sacrifice to their mother’s memory.

They change in silence and go to bed, Sam pressing the cool back of his hand to his swelling lip.

——

When Dad sees the picture on the wall the next morning, he yells at Sam to get out of the shower.

“You don’t ever act against me behind my back,” he says, once Sam’s standing in front of him. “And you don’t ever disrespect your mother again.”

“This isn’t about me disrespecting her,” Sam says. “It’s about me disrespecting you.”

Dad’s hand lands where Dean’s did last night, but harder, hard enough that Sam stumbles back. He hears the world buzz again, feels his heartbeat echo in his chest. But he rights himself and gets his feet planted.

“Hit me all you want,” Sam says. “It won’t change anything.”


End file.
